Age of War

Chapter 34

She stood, as if on a balcony, flanked by broken carvings now so caked in ice and snow that their original form was impossible to determine. The edge was protected by jagged balustrades, except for a space in the middle, directly in front of her, from which the bridge sprouted, like a thing grown rather than built. It was a narrow black arc of unbroken stone that rose gently in the middle and then dropped down to meet a similar portico at the top of the Archive. Nothing at all supported it underneath and, as she risked a glance over one of the balustrades, she saw it was a very long way down to a surface of unforgiving rocks and ice. The balustrades continued along the edge of the bridge, but time and the elements had not been kind of them, and mostly they’d crumbled and collapsed, leaving long stretches where there was nothing between a walker and the terrifying drop to certain death. The surface of the bridge was also covered in ice and snow like everything else – Jonis wouldn’t have felt safe on it even with something to hold onto. She licked her lips. Just looking at the bridge made her feel dizzy. It was vaguely abhorrent; a sinuous, natural shape wrought in stone. She had the image of a living serpent of blocky black masonry emerging from just in front of her and hurling itself headlong into the tower opposite, there to remain, fixed for eternity. She couldn’t imagine any other way it might have been built.

“You’re not some superstitious Talosi,” she said aloud, holding out her hands to steady herself even before she’d got on the perilous bridge. “They were every bit as unnerved by the Atlantian architecture around them. That’s all this is: an artefact of a people with knowledge you don’t yet possess. Nothing supernatural about it.” It didn’t help much. She placed one foot on the bridge and was immediately overtaken by nausea. It was the same sensation she’d had back in The Circle when they’d first arrived. She steeled herself and tried not to look down as she took another step forward. The world seemed to spin around her, but whether it was the odd effect of this place or vertigo from her precarious position, she couldn’t tell. She pushed it all away and kept walking, holding onto a balustrade when it was there, proceeding in a low crouch or even a crawl when it wasn’t. Her hands were soon numb. She’d forgotten the wind too, which buffeted her from both sides. This was the side of the mountain, and the edge of the city: to her right was nothing but heaped peaks capped with glimmering new snow. Jonis wished she was in a position to enjoy the view, but now as she reached the centre of the bridge’s parabola, the roiling in her head and stomach became almost overwhelming. She shut her eyes and held on tightly. That didn’t help: quite the reverse. Her head was filled with strange images. She saw a long line of robed figures on this very bridge, walking solemnly along while the mountains shook and rattled around them. At their head was an old woman with her hood pulled back: she had Keeper tattoos, but over both eyes. There was a roar all around her, the awful sound of worlds colliding as the Breath of Entropy was let loose. Jonis’s eyes snapped open and, for a moment, she thought she saw another storm of black lightning descending. She tried to scramble to her feet, lost her footing on the slippery surface and then fell backwards. There was no balustrade here, and as she landed she rolled onto her stomach. She stuck out a hand instinctively to find the floor, but grasped helplessly at empty air. She was lying half off the bridge and she could see her torch falling, its flickering light disappearing to a pinprick before it was lost in the rocks below. With aching slowness, she edged back onto the bridge, planting her hands down firmly beneath her. She lay there for a long while, just getting her breath back, and then stood up carefully and resumed her course, even more tentatively than before.

Finally, after what felt like hours, she arrived on the other side. She collapsed before the door and pressed herself up against the wall, savouring the solidity of the stonework. When she shut her eyes, the same visions came back, so she forced her eyelids open and stared at the black wall with its rime of frost until her heart rate went back to normal. Then she picked herself up and surveyed her situation. She now stood on a narrow ledge set against the curved edge of the tower. She was very high up, but compared to the centre of the bridge she felt like she was on solid ground. The air was as crisp as before, but she felt hot and bothered from the exertion of the crossing and longed to shrug out of her furs. She resisted temptation though and instead slung off her pack and knelt down to find another torch and flint to light it. It was ablaze in no time and she lifted it over her head before examining the door. Unlike the one in Atlas, this wasn’t a crude thing of wood and iron, but one of the great smooth stone doors that seemed to be the rule in Omega. Unlike the others, this one bore no carvings of any kind. Indeed its very blankness seemed to wrench the eye just as the bridge had. There was something disturbing about the architecture here, such that even though she felt a kinship with whoever built it, there was also a sense of alienation. “Humans didn’t do all this,” she whispered to herself as she ran a hand across the door’s slick surface. But, whatever its provenance, it began to open at her touch, just like the others.